The Institute for Transportation & Development Policy's new report, "More Development for Your Transit Dollar: An Analysis of 21 North American Transit Corridors" has been added to the Research Center's best practices database.

Simply having light rail doesn’t prompt people to drive less, according to researchers who looked at Denver’s existing light rail system. It is the integration of transit with the built environment that can prompt reductions in the vehicle miles driven.

Introduction
Most of the emphasis to date on TOD has been around residential development – building compact, mixed-use, mixed-income housing near transit, with shops and services nearby and a variety of transportation choices. Yet economic and workforce development are just as important to incorporate into transit-oriented communities. People who can take transit to work often spend less on transportation costs, saving them money to spend on other things. Employers also benefit by locating near transit in a variety of ways, from gaining access to a larger labor pool, saving money on things like parking and health care and greater convenience to clients and customers. Workforce training providers that locate near transit give potential workers greater access to their services and also lower the cost of taking such training courses in order to find a job. This is especially important for low- to middle-skill workers, who often need training beyond high school to get a good paying…

TRANSPORTWill Central Corridor Lessons Transfer to Southwest
Twin Cities Finance and Commerce
Businesses along the Central Corridor Light Rail Transit line had to sue in federal court to get the Metropolitan Council to provide an estimate of how much revenue local establishments lost during the transit line's construction.

Executive Summary
The LRT system in Denver, Colorado, connects the downtown with neighborhoods to the North, but primarily stretches southwards, travelling in existing transportation corridors carrying freeways and a heavy rail system. Outside of the downtown areas, the siting of the LRT system alongside the rigid infrastructure that comprises the heavy rail system and the freeway systems severely inhibits pedestrian accessibility to the transit system. To help further understand how the level of accessibility varies across the system, a systematic pedestrian level-of-service index for each station within the system was created that takes into account the formal, as well as informal street networks. This inaccessibility is highly likely to limit the potential that this system may have to generate development near station located that is fully integrated with the LRT system.
Primary data collected by surveying households across the metropolitan area revealed very little difference…